LXLE: Yet Another Linux Distro Targeting Old PCs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LXLE: Yet Another Linux Distro Targeting Old PCs

LXLE is yet another Linux distribution that targets old/slow/aging PCs. LXLE 14.04 is now in beta and at its heart is powered by Ubuntu 14.04 with the LXDE desktop environment...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTY5ODA

[tmpdir]

Always nice to see another promissing distro, certainly one based on Lubuntu. The article didn't mention much specifics, the home pages mentions some replaced services and other applications choices for "better integration".

They also claim: "Background processes optimized for minimal system footprint". Lets wait and see if this come true, don't think there's much to change considering Lubuntu is pretty much a bear minimum while still delivering a full desktop experience. they also replaced some very lightweight stuff for more heavy stuff, so I'm definitly interested in the final footprint and if its more optimized (read: less heavy) than Lubuntu itself.

[Mike Frett]

I've yet to find much of any distro that ran comfortably on 256MB Ram with a GUI. I have a ton of, as they say, old computers from late 90's and early 2000's with 256MB ram that need something besides Windows 95.

It's just darn odd that 95 can run with a nice GUI on even less than that but no modern Linux OS can; with a nice GUI mind you. Closest I found was Absolute Linux but it was dog slow.

[tmpdir]

I've yet to find much of any distro that ran comfortably on 256MB Ram with a GUI. I have a ton of, as they say, old computers from late 90's and early 2000's with 256MB ram that need something besides Windows 95.

It's just darn odd that 95 can run with a nice GUI on even less than that but no modern Linux OS can; with a nice GUI mind you. Closest I found was Absolute Linux but it was dog slow.

Same here. Last week helped a friend with updating their pc from windows xp to Lubuntu 14.04. It's a P3 with 128 MB an ran OK with windows XP. It was a lot slower using Lubuntu's default installation. They only use it for internet and i'm not planning to touch that machine again, so had to go with a minimal LTS install and a few selected packages to get acceptable speed results and still LTS support.

[curaga]

DSL runs a GUI with 16mb, TinyCore with 64mb. But if you try to run modern Firefox or LibreOffice with that RAM...

[Vim_User]

Try antiX or Vector Lite, they will run sufficient with on such machines. Of course, as curaga points out, you have to abstain from memory hogs like Firefox or Chrome/Chromium.
I wouldn't recommend to go for Tinycore, Slitaz or similar solutions, I don't think it makes any sense to put the filesystem into RAM on a machine where the problem is that you only have a tiny amount of RAM.

[tmpdir]

DSL runs a GUI with 16mb, TinyCore with 64mb. But if you try to run modern Firefox or LibreOffice with that RAM...

Thanks for the suggestion, DSL seems like a good one, never new its based on Debian which makes it an good replacement.

Try antiX or Vector Lite, they will run sufficient with on such machines. Of course, as curaga points out, you have to abstain from memory hogs like Firefox or Chrome/Chromium.
I wouldn't recommend to go for Tinycore, Slitaz or similar solutions, I don't think it makes any sense to put the filesystem into RAM on a machine where the problem is that you only have a tiny amount of RAM.

Will look into AntiX and Vector lite to. I like AntiX on paper, will test is this evening.

[DeepDayze]

Thanks for the suggestion, DSL seems like a good one, never new its based on Debian which makes it an good replacement.



Will look into AntiX and Vector lite to. I like AntiX on paper, will test is this evening.

AntiX you can't go wrong with...a solid distro that does run quite well on older machines yet can also run on the newest. The AntiX community is quite helpful and never lets people down when they need some help.

[profoundWHALE]

I've yet to find much of any distro that ran comfortably on 256MB Ram with a GUI. I have a ton of, as they say, old computers from late 90's and early 2000's with 256MB ram that need something besides Windows 95.

It's just darn odd that 95 can run with a nice GUI on even less than that but no modern Linux OS can; with a nice GUI mind you. Closest I found was Absolute Linux but it was dog slow.

Try Crunchbang?

[Artemis3]

Install Debian base, then add lxde-core, that gives you a desktop which uses about 40mb of ram.

If you replace lxde-core with a lighter wm such as icewm, you can probably do much better.